In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mistaken identities cause an uproar of emotional mix-ups. The background of the play is a simple love "square" involving four people.: Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander loves Hermia, but Demetrious also loves her, and Helena loves Demetrious. Hermia and Demetrious are engaged to marry against Hermia's will. They all end up running off into the wood on a magic spring evening when fairies turn everything upside down.
While they are asleep, Puck squeezes the juice from a magic flower that makes whomever's eye it enters to fall in love with the first person they see. He puts it onto Lysander's eye, thinking he was Demetrius. This begins the game of mistaken identities, because Helena is the first person Lysander sees, which causes him to fall in love with her instead of Hermia. So now, Lysander loves Helena, Helena loves Demetrius, Demetrius loves Hermia and Hermia loves Lysander. The confusion increases. Every encounter the couples have gets more confusing and exasperating. Then Puck realizes his mistake and puts the flower juice on Demetrius' eyes, making him fall in love with Helena as well. Helena, whose love towards Demetrius has been in vain, thinks that Lysander and Demetrius are mocking her, because they are both, suddenly, mysteriously in love with her. Her exasperation is ironic, because now she has too much love instead of too little. Her anger and verbal abuse of the lovers and of Hermia, whom she suspects of joining them in humiliating her, is also very funny. In the end Puck corrects his error and joins the couples as they should have been: Lysander loves Hermia and Hermia loves him and Demetrius loves Helena, and she does also, as she did before.
We observe another funny mistaken identity in the subplot, which is that of Bottom when he is turned into a man with an ass’ head and Titania falls
